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He was conscious, too, of a faint, simmering sense of desperation; it was like the feeling that would threaten to overwhelm him at the start of certain days in childhood when there was nothing in prospect, nothing of interest, nothing to do. Is that how his life would be from now on—a sort of living afterlife, a wandering in a Limbo among other souls who, like him, were neither saved nor lost?

He often recalled the first unsupervised post-mortem he had performed. He was working in those days with Thorndyke, the State Pathologist, who was already going gaga, and Quirke that day had been called on at short notice to stand in for the old boy. The cadaver was that of a large, silver-haired, antiquated gentleman who had died when the car in which he had been a passenger had skidded on a patch of ice and topped

Andy did not like priests. His folks had been Catholics, sort of, and at Easter time his Ma would lay off the gin for the day and take him and the rest of the kids on the bus trip down to Baltimore to go to High Mass there in the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen. He had hated those trips, the boredom of the Greyhound, the baloney sandwiches that were all they would have to eat until they got home again,